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hypnosec (2231454) writes "Anonymous has filed a petition with the US Government asking the Obama administration to make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a legal form of protests. Anonymous has argued that because of advancement in internet technology, there is a need for new ways of protests. The hacking collective doesn’t consider DDoS as a form of attack and equates it to hitting the ‘refresh’ button on a webpage. Comparing these attacks to the 'occupy' protests Anonymous notes that instead of people occupying an area, it is their computers occupying a website for a particular period of time."Link to Original Source

helix2301 writes "Every two months, AV-Test takes a look at popular antivirus software and security suites and tests them in several ways. In their latest test which was performed on Windows 7 during September and October, Microsoft Security Essentials didn't pass the test to achieve certification. Although that may not sound that impressive, Microsoft's program was the only one which didn't receive AV-Test's certificate. For comparison, the other free antivirus software, including Avast, AVG and Panda Cloud did."Link to Original Source

fezzzz (1774514) writes "Dr. Hugh S. Taylor performed a study on pregnant mice by placing a cell phone, with an active phone call on top of a cage and another cell phone, deactivated on top of the cage of the control group. He found that the mice exposed to cellphone radiation had reduced memory capacity and tended to be more hyperactive than the mice in the control group. This is not the first study to link cellphone radiation to a variety of problems, but the first I know of which were performed by Yale. Does anyone know if this study is remotely relevant to modern humans or not?"Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Molyneux's Curiosity game is only just out, but he's already talking about his next experiment. In an interview today, he says the next one will look more like a traditional game, but he's still after the same goal — figuring out how to make a game 100 million people will play at the same time. He also talks about how he came up with the concept of Curiosity — which has struggled since launch with (presumably) bandwidth issues — and how he's known what the prize would be for decades."Link to Original Source

cylonlover (1921924) writes "Earlier this year, Air Canada joined a growing number of airlines conducting flights using biofuels. Like similar flights by Boeing and Lufthansa, the aircraft was powered by a mix of petroleum and biofuel. Now the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has removed the fossil fuel component completely with the first flight of a civil jet powered by 100 percent unblended biofuel. In the milestone flight over Ottawa on October 29, the twin engines of a specially equipped Dassault Falcon 20 business jet were powered by a biofuel derived from oilseed crops. The Falcon 20, with NRC pilot Tim Leslie at the controls, was tailed by a T-33, which collected data on the emissions generated by the biofuel-powered aircraft. NRC researchers will use the information gathered during the flight to gain a better understanding of the environmental impact of biofuel."Link to Original Source

derekmead (2466858) writes "By law, US companies don’t have to say a word about hacker attacks, regardless of how much it might’ve cost their bottom line. Comment, the group of Chinese hackers suspected in the recent-reported Coke breach, also broke into the computers of the world’s largest steel company, ArcelorMittal. ArcelorMittal doesn’t know exactly how much was stolen and didn’t think it was relevant to share news of the attack with its shareholders. Same goes for Lockheed Martin who fended off a “significant and tenacious” attack last May but failed to disclose the details to investors and the Securities Exchange Commission. Dupont got hit twice by Chinese hackers in 2009 and 2010 and didn’t say a word.

Former U.S. counterintelligence chief Joel Brenner recently said that over 2,000 companies, ISPs and research centers had been hit by Chinese hackers in the past decade and few of them told their shareholders about it. This is even after the SEC has made multiple requests for companies to come clean about cyber security breaches in their quarterly or annual earnings reports. Because the potential losses, do hacked companies have a responsibility to report security breaches to investors?

There’s no easy way for the SEC to force companies to comply with their requests. In some cases, the companies don’t even know they’ve been targeted by hackers until well after the attack. Sometimes, they give passing mention to an incident with boilerplate language about a security breach or the risk of data theft. They’re not likely to admit that hackers cost them billions, though. Unless rules change, it looks like if the SEC is going to get any serious hacking disclosure at all, they’ll need the help of a few companies leading the way on the disclosures."Link to Original Source

concealment writes "A petition to get British wartime crypto-boffin Alan Turing on the next ten-pound note has broken 20,000 signatures on the government's e-petition site.

At least 23,157 people have signed the pledge that praises his contribution to computer science, the nation and the world, and calls for Turing to replace Charles Darwin when the notes come up for a redesign.

After the petition passed the 10,000 mark the Treasury confirmed that Turing is on the list of people suggested by the public and is under consideration for inclusion on banknotes."Link to Original Source

Russia, China and other countries back a move to place the Internet under the authority of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency that sets technical standards for global phone calls.While US officials have said placing the Internet under UN control would undermine the freewheeling nature of cyberspace, some have said there is a perception that the US owns and manages the Internet.

The head of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, claims his agency has "the depth of experience that comes from being the world's longest established intergovernmental organization." But Harold Feld of the US-based non-government group Public Knowledge said any new rules could have devastating consequences. Some are concerned over a proposal by European telecom operators seeking to shift the cost of communication from the receiving party to the sender. This could mean huge costs for US Internet giants like Facebook and Google.

"There is no Internet central office. Its openness and decentralization are its strengths," Terry Kramer, the special US envoy for the talks, said, reminding that Washington is opposing proposals by Russia, China and others to expand the ITU's authority to regulate the Internet.

SternisheFan writes "By NATASHA LOMAS, Techcrunch:
After losing an appeal in a UK high court last week against a judgement that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablets do not infringe the design of the iPad because their design is just not cool enough, Apple has now published an acknowledgement of the court’s judgement on its U.K. website —in line with the court order. You can’t call it an apology —quite the opposite: Apple makes it clear it does not agree with the court’s decision by pointing out that it has had court wins against Samsung for the same design patent in Germany, and noting its huge win against the Korean gadget maker in the U.S this summer.
Apple also focuses on the judge’s reasons for dismissing its patent claim —quoting the judge’s detailed ruling on exactly what makes the iPad’s design so much cooler than the Galaxy Tab, in which he talks almost lovingly of the “extreme simplicity” of the iPad’s design; its “undecorated surfaces”; “crisp edge” and “combination of curves”. Apple then contrasts that with what the judge had to say about the Galaxy Tab: “very thin, almost insubstantial” with “unusual details on the back” —and the conclusion: “not cool”. (See full article for) Apple’s acknowledgment in full.
The acknowledgement has not been published on the homepage of Apple’s U.K. website but there is a link to it —right at the bottom of the page, next to the notification about Apple’s use of cookies."Link to Original Source

The GMT has 7 mirrors, each 8m wide. The 30m Telescope has one 30m mirror, plus a 3m secondary mirror.
I'm not sure which would be optically better, but I'd guess that the GMT will have more uptime as you can remove a mirror for cleaning without taking down the entire telescope.

I'm sure one of the first things that you think of when using big pieces of glass is the fact that they'll get dirty. A little bit of googling tells us that the mirrors will be regularly CO2 -cleaned, (basically blasting all dirt off the surface of the mirror) - see section 10.11:
http://www.gmto.org/science-conceptu.html . Each mirror will also get recoated every 2 years, to prevent scratches and blemishes.

Can't seem to access the PDF link to read more into it.
Interesting that the (sometimes) hours of effort involved in derailing a message thread or debate only pays 50 cents - one might argue that you'd be looking at 50-100 threads at once, but surely that's still not enough to justify the hours of work that must go into it each day?